Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

the others, Vaemar having to hold them as Karan worked. Fortunately the locators were intended to be removeable, but not like this and it was painful work. Human and kzin blood spilt and ran together in the sand. No doubt with the heat and change in chemical environment the devices would be transmitting emergency signals before they cooked. Rosalind/Henrietta's head was smoldering now. Much of the skin and flesh had burnt or peeled away to reveal a metal skull.

Get in the water! His instinct shrieked, and he knew his instinct was wrong. The water would soon be boiling, as it had boiled before. He had seen pictures of the original kzin landings on Wunderland, and of what had happened when, at both Munchen and Neue Dresden, humans had tried to take refuge from fires in pools and fountains. Last time it had happened in the swamp, the creatures in the water had flung themselves ashore before the end . . . Already the water around Marshy's boat was boiling, stream beginning to rise again in a white curtain. And Vaemar realized the boat's brains and electronics were probably already cooking. As he watched, one of its guns began to fire, cycling a stream of bolts in random arcs high into the sky.

Another thought: the boat's power-source was probably a molecular-distortion battery. That would cook off also. In the war, human guerrilla forces had used MD batteries as bombs. The boat was far too close. Desperately, Vaemar wondered if he might leap into the water and push it away. The boat was firing other weapons now, as well as flares. Its siren began a screaming noise that sounded like its brain crying out.

A green bar of light slammed downwards through the smoke-obscured sky. None of those huddled on the sandbar had ever seen anything like it: a heavy naval battle-laser, mounted as either the major armament of a capital warship or in a military satellite. There was another beam, and another, converging on the hulk. The water around it was boiling in earnest now. Gun turrets on the hulk were firing again, but randomly, as ready-use ammunition cooked off. A hatch opened and it launched a Scream-of-Vengeance fighter. But it was either uncrewed or crewed by half-dead Jotok and simply flew in a crazy parabola before crashing in the swamp and exploding. A weird combination of flames and steam was jetting out of the holes in the great hulk.

"Cover your eyes!" cried Marshy.

Even with eyes covered and faces pressed into the sand, they saw the white flash as a bank of MD batteries in the hulk exploded. There were more explosions. Then the green beams cut off.

"They would have detected the kzin heat-induction ray at once," said Marshy. "We will have to tell them it wasn't kzinti using it." He pulled a com-link from the discarded exoskeleton and spoke urgently into it. A wave hit the sandbank, slopped over the fused glass of the ridge and splashed them. It was hot, just short of unbearable.

The secondary explosions became less frequent, then stopped. The clouds of steam drifted away and they saw the hulk clearly again. Where it had previously plainly been a derelict kzin warship, it was now a twisted, shattered, unrecognizable mass of blackened wreckage and slag, the water about it still bubbling and boiling. No living thing could be seen on or in it. They stood staring at it in silence for some time. Marshy worked on Swirl-Stripes with a small, portable doc. Its lights at length pronounced his condition stabilized. Then Karan pointed: Kzin eyes could make out that dead Jotok of all sizes were floating out of the wreckage. Already, from nowhere, a few carrion-eating flying things had appeared in the sky.

"Nothing could have survived that," said Marshy. "But perhaps we should go and look." He splashed to his boat. "The brain's not quite cooked," he said as he returned. "But it was a near thing. Most of the electronics are out, but we've got a ride home." He was carrying lightweight ABC suits, protection against atomic, biological or chemical contamination, and passed these to the other humans.

"I'll take Anne and Hugo," he went on, helping Hugo into one. "I've none to fit kzinti. You had better stay and look after your companion till we return." He looked down at Rosalind/Henrietta's body. "That had better be disposed of," he added, tactfully. "Does she have a family?"

Anne tore her eyes away from the bare metallic skull and the hands stilled in the act of trying to claw it open. Her own face was very white. "She told me she was an orphan," she said in a somewhat shaky voice. That was not surprising. There were, after all, many orphans on Wunderland. "Forgive me . . . it's . . . it's nothing."

Hugo placed his uninjured arm round Anne's shoulder and guided her to the water's edge where she too donned a suit. Vaemar, watching, though again how strange and simian the naked humans looked, with their odd tufts of hair, sexual characteristics and ungraceful taillessness. And yet companions, he thought. Hugo and Anne splashed out to the boat. Msrshy retrieved a decontamination kit from it and sprayed them all.

"You seek to finish the Jotok?" Vaemar asked Marshy.

"No. To preserve any we can, though I have little hope of that."

"For what? A new generation of slaves for the Wunderkzin? Perhaps there are still a few skilled Trainers-of-Jotok among the kzinti here."

"No."

"Or for the humans?"

"No. Unless they are trained very early they cannot live as slaves. In any case enslavement, even of another species, is contrary to all human law, and Wunderland, I need hardly remind you, is part of human space again . . . But I shall have to search thoroughly. We shall be gone a little while," he added as the boat moved away.

Vaemar turned to the body again. Henrietta. His Honored Sire's slave, who his Honored Sire had at last addressed as "Friend." Who had mourned